A significant portion of my Chanco memories that seem like happy ones now were actually pretty scary experiences at the time. Yes, this entry is about the ropes course, and specifically the Pamper Pull. Or was it the Pamper Pole? I'm not sure what its official name was, or why it got the name. The closest to an explanation I ever got was that, in completing this particular ropes course element, you were "pulling off your pampers" and growing up. Or something. And of course, the main part of the whole event was the pole itself, so maybe it was the Pamper Pole, and that whole "pulling off your pampers" bit was a misunderstanding that became conventional camper wisdom. A lot of things work that way in life, especially at places like Camp Chanco, which always seemed to me more like a hippie summer camp that had secretly invaded an organized church community than any real businesslike organization. Of course, I could be wrong--I've never been to the business office.

I'm getting off track. Anyway, in my memories of the ropes course, the Pamper Pole (let's just call it that, since that's how its typically referred to on this site) dominates, almost to the exclusion of anything else. Oh sure, I remember the trust fall, and vaguely remember the two-line bridge, but in my mind, it's all about the Pamper Pole. I tend to think of it as iconic in Camp Chanco history, but looking around the site, I've discovered that, according to Anthony Cox's profile, the ropes course was new in 1982, and of course the camp moved to a new location in 1989. So I guess there were only seven years during which the Pamper Pole was a big deal. Therefore, I'm going to go ahead and explain it, for the benefit of those of you who were at Chanco before or after its tenure.

The Pamper Pole was a tree with all of its branches cut off, and the sorts of metal bars that act as steps so repairmen can climb telephone poles hammered into it. It was somewhere between 22 and 24 feet high, if I remember correctly. When you climbed to the top of it, there was a trapeze directly in front of you, suspended between two trees. The idea was that you climbed to the top of the pole, stood on the platform at the top, jumped across to the trapeze, caught it, hung from it for a few seconds, then let go and were slowly lowered to the ground by the ropes course instructor, who of course had you on belay the entire time.

This process was way more complicated than it seemed, mainly because of the idiosyncrasies of that good old Pamper Pole. You see, while the first half or so of the metal pegs that had been hammered into the pole were neat and straight, providing easy, obvious handholds, the last half were just hammered into the tree in any old random spot. The story I heard was that the person constructing the pole had had a ladder to stand on while attaching the lower pegs, but eventually got high enough that the ladder could no longer reach, and had to attach the rest of the pegs by climbing the pole to the point where the pegs stopped and hammering the rest of them in wherever he/she could reach to place them. Does that sound like total craziness to you? It does to me, at least when I think about it today. But at the age of 10, it seemed reasonable enough.

So you climbed the pole pretty easily for the first half, but when you got to the randomly attached pegs, it got a lot more complicated. First of all, those randomly attached pegs were a lot more likely to catch in random spots on your harness, or snag your rope, or both, and second of all, the fact that the handholds became a lot harder to find at the same moment that you were starting to get pretty high up the pole was scary. Really, to me, the whole thing was scary. In fact, in my first year at Chanco, when I was 10, I refused to climb the Pamper Pole at all. I've been deathly afraid of heights all my life, and at 10 years old, the idea of climbing that pole was more than I could bear. When I was 11, in 1987, my campsite did the two-line bridge instead, and only about half of us got to do it because one camper froze up in mid-attempt and took an hour to be talked down (the rest of us were quietly ushered away after 10 minutes or so). I have my doubts that I would have done the two-line bridge, either, but I never really had to find out.

Finally, in 1988, the last year at the old camp, I climbed the Pamper Pole. Looking back, that Chanco session in general could fit this entry's title just as well as my memory of the ropes course in particular. 12 is a tough age, or at least it was for me, and I wasn't getting along with at least half of the campers in my campsite at all that year. Then again, maybe that's exactly why it was that year that I chose to climb the Pamper Pole--the last thing I needed was to give 7 other boys even more of a reason to make fun of me. Regardless of depressing implications, though, I'm glad I had the experience, so if nothing else, I guess dealing with teasing had one positive result.

But so there I was: 12 years old, climbing the Pamper Pole, trying not to get my rope caught on all these random pegs that jutted out everywhere, trying not to look down and realize how far up I was... and the pole was shaking. The pole always shook, which is another thing that made reaching its higher levels complicated. I assume that, regardless of it being a once-living tree that was surely dead by the time we all climbed it, it was anchored pretty securely into the ground. After all, Greg Willis posted a picture he took of it in 2007, 19 years after the old camp had been left behind, and it still stood (even if it was missing most of its metal pegs). Anchor or no anchor, though, that thing was not steady, and it swayed like a drunken sailor when someone was hanging from its upper reaches. I would have been scared enough had it been stock-still, but the swaying made it even scarier. I'm sure I was terrified by the time I reached the platform at the top.

I don't know how many of you remember standing at the top of the Pamper Pole, but that platform was tiny. I remember one of my counselors joking that it was the size of a pair of size 5 tennis shoes, but it might very well have been smaller than that, because I remember my feet sticking out past the edges, and I only wear size 10 tennis shoes now, so I might very well have worn size 5s when I was 12. If the swaying was bad when you were climbing the pole, it was so much worse when you were standing on top of it. I have a clear memory of being on the platform, standing up straight and tall--which was not something you could do even remotely quickly--and finally looking down to see my campsite mates looking up at me with wide eyes. Then they swayed away from me, and the ropes course instructor (was it Drew that year? Or Josh? I don't remember) came into view. Then a few seconds later, the campsite was back in the center of my vision, all without me moving an inch. That thing was really swaying. But I had made it to the top.

When I jumped from the platform to the trapeze, my nervousness finally made itself known, in that my hands slapped the trapeze, but I couldn't get them to actually grab onto it. I dropped several feet quickly, then was caught and lowered slowly to the ground by the instructor. We were always told to flap our arms and tweet like a birdie as we were being lowered, and even when I was 10 I recognized that that was a distraction so we didn't get too scared about being held up only by one guy with a harness. For me, though, the scary part was over--I was on the way down from the horrible height, back to the sweet sweet ground. Of course, the summer when I was 12 was also the summer that a great many of us got covered in chigger bites while sitting on the ground waiting our turn. Bug bites were a big part of Chanco too, at least for me. And just like the Pamper Pole, and the ropes course later, what was probably tough to deal with at the time seems fun and amusing in retrospect . Maybe that's part of pulling off our pampers and growing up, too.

P.S.--To those of you who are here regularly, sorry for disappearing for 9 months. It's a long story, involving cars, money, and self-esteem, or more explicitly my lack of all three. Hopefully I'll be making more regular posts here in the future, now that I've managed to make it back at all, but I think we all promise that, don't we?